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Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler has worked in book publishing for 25 years. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (for the SFBC and others), and is now does marketing for Wiley. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year (and he's doing it again now!). He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Chip Kidd is a smart guy who does some great work (many of his cover designs, as collected in Book One; his first novel, The Cheese Monkeys) and who also gets in his own way by being too smart all too often (his second novel, The Listeners; most of the books of comics he's designed, like Bat-Manga!, Jack Cole and Plastic Man, Peanuts). So I was somewhat sanguine coming into Batman: Death by Design; I wasn't sure which Chip Kidd would show up.

But
Good Chip Kidd is usually in control when he's telling his own stories
-- it's primarily when he's packaging someone else's material that Bad
Chip Kidd assumes control -- and so Death by Design, though a bit cluttered with Kidd's enthusiasms and not really, at its core, a Batman
story, turns out to be an entertaining graphic novel set in a vaguely
mid-century out-of-continuity Gotham City obsessed with architecture.
It's a quite wordy book, and Batman isn't nearly as central or important
as he usually is in a story with his name and face on the cover -- it
could almost serve as a launching point for Exacto, the vigilante
architect, if DC or Kidd wanted it to.

I was also
amused that one of the primary figures of evil here is the union boss
who ruined the old Wayne Central Station of Gotham; who says that those effete New York types are all reflexively leftist? But, in the end,
it's the usual thing for an out-of-continuity superhero story: set in a
romanticized and simplified version of the creator's favorite past era,
with lots of appropriate baubles and gewgaws, only as much
characterization as is required to keep the story going, some sturdy
superhero-ing, and whatever semi-extraneous enthusiasm the creators
bring to it: in this case, mid-century architecture.